Saturday, September 21, 2013

The Great 2013 Baseball Card Draft - Part 1

The latest craze in the JMR household is Baseball Cards.

Now, one of the hobbies that I enjoyed when I was a kid was collecting baseball cards. Starting in 1978, I used all of my allowance money to buy those glossy Topps brand cardboard pieces. I used to beg my Father to buy me baseball cards from the local store that was near his shop. I used to bug my brother to give me his baseball cards that he never looked at. I used to sort my baseball cards by team. It was an obsession for me. I went to baseball card stores. I attended the local baseball card conventions and I tried my luck at baseball card auctions. When I was a little older, I even tried my hand at this baseball card pyramid scheme to make some money (that went great!...!). Steve Yeager should be proud that he suckered someone.

Over the years, I had collected some interesting baseball cards. Nothing that special, but I had some old baseball cards from the 1950's that were worth hundreds of dollars. It represented a time in my life that I wanted to remember. And I was not going to part with them easily, or so I thought

Fast forward to a year ago when the boys started bugging me about baseball cards themselves. Now my boys had gotten interested in other things previously (coins, cars, etc.) and every time they lost interest just as quickly. My house is littered with their failed hobbies. One day I saw them going through my baseball cards (not taking any, they insisted) and in a fit of paternal love, I told them that if they were still interested in baseball cards a year from now, I would split up my cards between the two of them.

"Dad, can we have your baseball cards, now?" G asked me almost one year to the day that I promised them that I would do so.

"Yes, let me figure out how to do it in as fair of a way as I can" I remarked, without a tone of stalling at all.

"Me too, Dad. And I'm the oldest!" C explains thinking that being the oldest means anything more than a free babysitter when he turns 12 years old.

Finally, on a random weekend afternoon when the girls went out to do their nails, I gave the boys their chance to share in my childhood memories. But first, we had to figure out who was going to go first. I had the day before decided on doing this in a draft format. Whoever got the first pick got Jackie Robinson. Then the other one got the next two picks, and so on. So I figured out that we would pick numbers 1-9 to see who goes first. Best out of 5.

It was nerve wracking to say the least. Even LC was interested in this as the boys were hopping around as the number would fall in each series. To make it as fair as possible, I chose the number and had LC keep them in a hermetically sealed envelope (well not that far, but she was the gatekeeper of the numbers). Finally after 20 long minutes of angst, G won the first pick 3-2.

After C was finished pummeling his little brother, we retired up to the little couch room to begin the draft. I promised 2 hours of entertainment and story telling of how I got the cards. They promised not to beat the crap out of each other.